


it's real because you feel it

by MicrosuedeMouse



Category: Blade Runner (Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Found Family, Gen, Healing, Hope, Hurt/Comfort, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 02:13:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14631960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MicrosuedeMouse/pseuds/MicrosuedeMouse
Summary: “Why did you save me?” K’s voice is hoarse, unused for days.Deckard gives him a hard look. “Do I need a reason?”-He's alive, but that doesn't mean he's healed. It will be a long, long time before he's healed. (If healing is even an option any more.)





	it's real because you feel it

**Author's Note:**

> Blade Runner is one of my dad's all-time favourite movies - which is weird, because it's a lot of things he normally doesn't like at all, but hey - and I've always found it... pretty weird. We finally got around to watching Blade Runner 2049 recently and it's _also_ pretty weird, and heartbreaking, and difficult, but uh... I seem to be kind of obsessed with it. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it and everything it leaves for the viewer to decide, I guess. Anyway, I needed to write this? I don't know why exactly, but I needed it out of my system.
> 
> Cheers. Hope you enjoy.

K expects nothing after he closes his eyes. He expects to wake up again least of all.

When he does, the wound is clean. The skin of his abdomen isn’t smooth, but it’s stitched back together and healing. There’s no blood. There _are_ bandages – several. More than he’d realised he would need, if he’d even thought they’d do him any good.

There is also pain. His side, his head, his legs. This is familiar – bearable. The way his heart aches is much less so.

(Not his heart. If his emotions are real, they do not come from his heart. And yet.)

He feels – empty, he supposes, or at least that’s the word that humans use. He’s felt empty before. That’s why he brought Joi home. But now he’s known Joi, and known home, and lost both. It hurts. That’s the only thing to call it: hurt. For a short while he knew purpose, too, and that’s gone as well. He was very little before Joi, before home, before purpose – and after them, he is nothing at all.

Deckard is there, gruff and unforgiving in his efforts to heal K’s broken body. K knows he should be thankful, but he cannot muster gratitude. He also cannot bring himself to fight back, so in that way, Deckard wins.

 

“Why did you save me?” K’s voice is hoarse, unused for days.

Deckard gives him a hard look. “Do I need a reason?”

K considers that for a moment. He’s had his life saved before, but never just for the sake of it. “No one does good without a motive,” he finally says. “Not any more. Or at least, not for me.”

Every kindness he’s ever been shown has expected repayment.

Deckard is frowning. “First time for everything,” he grunts, and then he finishes his drink and leaves.

Over the next few days, K pries for fragments of Deckard’s motivations. “I owed you,” the older man says at one point.

“No one should die like that.”

“You’re the first person I’ve trusted since 2020.”

And then, one night, after too many glasses of whiskey, “I won’t be around forever.” He glances in the direction of Ana’s room, and K finally understands. He can feel peace now, because this makes sense.

Deckard looks at him and realises what he’s done. “Forget it, Joe,” he says. “That’s not what I– I helped you because you were dying. It’s that simple. I came out the door and found you dying and I stopped it. There was no other thinking behind it.”

“It’s okay,” K answers, forgiving. He is accustomed to being a means to pursue someone else’s goals.

“No, I mean it,” Deckard insists – and he seems angry. With himself, perhaps; K can’t tell. “I saved you because I wanted to save you, Joe. Don’t think you owe me.”

 

Joe.

The name she gave him.

He could never ask her why she picked it. Was it because it was so close to her own? Or was there some other logic to it, something she’d never gotten the chance to divulge? For a moment he imagines asking her, imagines her evading the question with a smile and himself chasing her for an answer, laughing. And then he stops imagining, because it hurts too much.

There’s so much he doesn’t know; so many questions he never thought to ask until it was too late to get answers. Thinking about it makes him wish he didn’t exist. He can’t bear the pain of it, so he distracts himself. Deckard says they’ve been here too long, they’re going to be found any time now – they have to move on. So K throws himself into helping Deckard prepare to leave.

Deckard and Ana have done a lot of talking. Then, cobbling tests together from the upgrade centre’s equipment and Ana’s knowledge, they’ve checked to make sure: her immune system is fine. It was only ever a cover story, a lie told to keep her in one place.

She can leave.

When she takes her first cautious steps out of the sealed room, both men are there. Deckard re-introduces K to Ana, and she’s sweet and gentle, as if he hadn’t stormed out of her visiting room in an explosion of (grief, distress, confusion, rage?) the last time they met.

She holds out her hand, and he shakes it.

“Joe,” she repeats softly, after her father.

It hurts to be called that name. K says nothing.

 

They go back to Vegas first. Deckard is careful this time in ways he wasn’t when K first arrived – checks thoroughly for trackers, makes sure they leave no trace. Ana leaves her laboratory running in such a way that it should be days before anyone knows she’s gone, if not more.

They arrive in Deckard’s hotel. A dangerous stop to make, they know, but Deckard thinks it’s worth it. There are things there he wants to collect – things that will make the weeks (months, years, though no one says it) ahead of them easier. In a kitchen they find Deckard’s dog, his coat matted and his ribs showing a little, but otherwise fine. He’s been living off of Deckard’s stashed food, chewing his way through plastic packaging and eating the crackers and protein supplements he finds inside. “Good dog,” Deckard mutters, kneeling to scratch the creature’s neck. Ana cries when she touches his fur.

They stockpile Deckard’s weapons and rations and, admittedly, whiskey. They ditch the spinner they brought here in favour of an older, bigger model Deckard had kept inside, away from the elements. It’s a bit of a risk, but the trade-off for more space is worth it, they decide. Deckard rips a few good parts out of the spinner they’re abandoning and fits them into the big one, Frankenstein-style, and they all hope it’ll be enough.

When they leave, Deckard tries to rib K about the loss of a hideout that has worked for him for thirty years. He comes off just a little less playful than he meant for. K doesn’t know what to say.

 

“I’m sorry,” Ana says softly, the third night after Vegas. K looks at her questioningly. “For the memory,” she clarifies. “It made everything so much harder for you. I shouldn’t have given you that. I was… young. I was tired and alone. But that’s no excuse.”

He sits back and considers that for a moment. They’re outside, and between storms, and so far from any occupied city that he can actually see a few stars when he looks into the sky. He feels very small.

“I hope I did right by you,” he says finally. It’s all he can think to say. He knows he brought Deckard to her without her knowing they were coming, or what that would mean, and he wishes now that he could justify those actions – that he could have done it knowing what she wanted. She didn’t deserve this all thrown at her out of nowhere.

“You did,” she answers. “I don’t… like the way the world is. But I don’t want to be the figurehead of a revolution. At least, not one like Freysa’s.”

He nods quietly, letting out a long breath. It’s a relief he hadn’t known he would feel. He doesn’t know what comes next, but Ana isn’t lying to him, and that’s something.

 

K doesn’t know why he came along with them, except that there was nothing else for him to do. He has no job to go back to, and he certainly can’t return to Freysa and her rebels. The lie he told his Lieutenant – which was only a lie by omission – had been the first of his short life, and a challenge. He wouldn’t be able to lie to Freysa about what had happened; not for long. So instead he goes with Deckard and Ana and none of them ever question it.

It isn’t long before he realises that Deckard is teaching him. The man explains every action he takes, describes what he’s looking for in a hideout as they go from one abandoned city to the next. He shows K where to look for more food and how to watch out for signs of other people who might be hiding nearby.

K almost asks why before he remembers: “ _I won’t be around forever._ ”

“You’re doing this so that I can protect her when you’re gone,” he says one day, matter-of-factly (but not unkindly), while Ana sleeps curled around the dog in the back of the spinner and they’re searching for a sheltered place to stop overnight.

Deckard searches K’s face, brows furrowed heavily. “I’m doing this so you can protect _both_ of you,” he says. He doesn’t address that unspoken expectation they all have that this arrangement will go on indefinitely. Neither does K, because at this point, he can’t imagine any other future. Even if everything hurts, at least it gives him a reason to _be_.

Deckard seems to sense a complacent understanding in K’s expression, and his frown deepens. “I’m not saying you need to protect yourself just so you can keep protecting her,” he adds, a little sharply. “Protect yourself because you _also_ deserve to live.”

K can’t help himself. “Why?”

“Maybe no one ever told you this before, kid,” Deckard says with a sigh, turning his attention back out the windshield. “But you deserve to live because you’re alive.”

 

They find what Deckard deems to be a decent place to stop running, in the remains of a city further north and further inland than any of them have ever been. None of them know what this place used to be called, but there’s something that was once an apartment building (or condo?) that should serve their purposes. While Ana takes up residence in the crumbling library with her father’s dog, Deckard and K set traps in all the entrances and search the building top to bottom for useful supplies. In the next few weeks, Deckard says, they’ll venture out into the surrounding area, see what they can find. It’s good to learn the terrain, he explains.

K never would have imagined his life this way. He never would have imagined it as anything other than working for the LAPD until eventually he exhausted his usefulness and was retired. He feels oddly apathetic. He ought to be dead, so this, he supposes, is fine.

It’s fine.

Deckard isn’t used to human (close-to-human) company any more, and it becomes immediately apparent as soon as they have time to stop and sit down. He doesn’t know how to carry a conversation or relate to someone successfully. K barely lives in his own mind. So Ana takes it upon herself to facilitate interaction. She starts discussions, she ushers everyone into one room at least once a day, she asks questions.

She, too, is desperate, K realises. She’s been alone for twenty years or more. The parents she once mentioned to him, it occurs to him one night, may well not have existed. (How much does she know about what she is, about where she comes from, about Freysa’s intentions for her? Or how much _did_ she know, before Deckard told her? She doesn’t seem to want to talk about her past any more.) She has been torn from all she knows and her whole foreseeable future, now, consists of two broken men and a derelict deserted city that is collapsing in on itself. With this sudden comprehension, K softens to her somewhat. She is not as ruined as he is and she deserves the chance to hang onto whatever semblance of personhood she still has, so he tries for her.

 

He awakens one night with a shout so loud that Deckard comes running. He has yet to sleep without dreaming of her. The only person (‘person’) who ever believed in him, named him, loved him. She is gone and ever since the moment she disappeared he’s been wondering, desperately: was she real? Was it real? Before all of this he didn’t care, because she was a program but so was he, only with a physical form. Now that he doesn’t have her any more he needs to know, more than he’s ever needed to know anything.

“Was it real for _you?_ ” Deckard asks him simply. “Did you feel it? Did you love her?”

This, too, is a question K has agonised over, because he’s not sure if _he’s_ real, let alone his _feelings_. But when he hears it posed to him by someone else, there is only one answer: “Yes.”

“Then it was real,” Deckard says. “You’re as real as I am, Joe, no matter where you came from. What you feel is real. You exist, your feelings exist – that’s all that _real_ means. Don’t waste your time wondering how much it counts. You’ll only bring more pain.”

After Deckard leaves, K lies awake a long time, thinking about that and about Joi and about reality.

He loved her – loves her.

She loved him.

She named him Joe.

 

“Can I ask you a question, Joe?” Ana asks him in the library one day, while he’s staring out the window.

“Of course,” he answers, because he always does. She’s always polite and gentle, always asking permission, and he always grants it.

“It seems like… a weight has lifted off of you recently. Not all of it, but something. You seem more at peace.”

He waits for the question, but it doesn’t come, so he turns to raise his eyebrows at her. She smiles sheepishly, understanding his unspoken point.

“I don’t know. I’m curious what changed, but you don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to. I’m happy for you, though.”

This takes him by surprise, so much so that he’s momentarily thrown completely off-balance. “I… thank you,” he finally says.

Ana gets up from her seat and approaches him so that she can press his hand, just for a moment. Since leaving her sterile chamber she seems fascinated with touch, but neither of the men she’s with quite know what to do with it, so she restrains herself. Mostly she lays with the dog and he allows her to shower him with affection, wagging his tail as she does.

As she takes her hand back and returns to her chair, he feels her absence in a strange way. He’s not used to being touched except in violence, and her softness is novel and strange, though he’s learned not to flinch back from her. This is another thing he never imagined: human (non-human) contact.

He returns to the window, lost in thought.

 

The three of them become… something. They learn to live this way, sharing space, sharing resources, looking out for one another. Sometimes they are even happy, for a moment or two at a time. There are days when they take the dog to the open meeting hall on the first floor and throw scraps of rubble for him to chase. There are days when they all sit together in the library and read – sometimes Joe reads to the other two, a bittersweet and familiar pastime, but it doesn’t hurt like it might have before. It’s only a dull ache now. There are days that they talk about the world they left behind. There are even days, sometimes, that they laugh.

Joe remembers a girl who said with disgust that he didn’t know how to smile. At the time, he believed that Joi was the only one who would ever bring a smile to his face. He’s grateful he was wrong, and he knows Joi would be too.

Some days, when he remembers her, he doesn’t cry.

 

Time passes without their keeping track. Joe still knows how long it’s been, because his sense of time is designed to be flawless, but he doesn’t say a word. It seems like this is easier if they don’t pay attention, if they let one day slide into the next without acknowledging it.

Because of this, Deckard isn’t sure how long it’s been when he’s scavenging a few blocks out from their home base and spots one of Wallace’s drones in the distance. He lets it pass before returning home to tell Ana and Joe about it. He can’t prove it’s looking for them – after all, two out of three of them are most likely presumed dead – but there’s no way they can afford to risk it.

“I was afraid this could happen,” he admits to Joe, knocking back another drink after Ana’s drifted off to sleep. “Wallace isn’t stupid. Even if he hasn’t put anything together yet, he doesn’t have our bodies, so he’s almost certainly got alerts set up in case our faces show up on a feed somewhere. We’re boned if he finds either of us alive – more so if he sees his missing star memory designer with us. Then he _will_ work it all out.”

“So we go on the move,” Joe surmises, turning the wooden elephant over in his hands. Ana had kept the horse, but she had wanted Joe to have one of the others. Something to hold onto.

“It has its own risks,” Deckard says, and he sounds tired. “But we can’t stay put.”

They spend most of the night preparing to leave. When Ana wakes up, they tell her the plan, and she agrees unhappily. She sees why it’s necessary. Her father lets her bring a few of the books from the library. The last thing they do before they set out is carefully disarm their traps and pack up the parts they can reuse, because if they’re going to keep running every resource is that much more valuable.

 

They go on the lam; they never stay in one place for long. When they dare to talk about the passage of time, Ana and Deckard measure it in places they’ve been. Joe doesn’t tell them the truth.

They live as nomads, as scavengers. The books they pick up to read in one temporary home and then abandon in the next make such a lifestyle sound exciting, romantic – it’s not. They struggle. Staying under the radar is a challenge, and a tiring one at that. Then there’s the matter of finding new rations, of finding safe places to sleep, of finding fuel for the spinner and water to drink. Everything feels like a risk. The laughter they’d just begun to learn is already waning. Sometimes, late at night, if their camp feels secure and they need a boost, they drink too much and manage to smile.

For the first while they never stay anywhere for more than a few days. Later, as they grow a little more confident – and, frankly, as the lifestyle takes its toll – they stay put a little longer. A week here and there, ten days another time. The longest they stop is three weeks, once, when the weather is simply too bad to risk going anywhere. But they never settle in. They don’t let themselves get attached. Or hopeful.

It’s not an easy way to live. They’re doing their best. They’re learning how to coordinate their efforts. It’s not _good_ , but after a while, it’s not _terrible_ , either. At least they know they can depend on each other. At least they still have Deckard’s experience, Joe’s strength, Ana’s warmth. A dog who will lick their hands affectionately, regardless of how hard the day has been. It’s hard, but they’re safe for another night, and they will deal with tomorrow when it arrives.

Deckard is looking tired.

 

In the back of the spinner, Ana is reclining against a long-flattened pillow, the dog asleep with his head in her lap. Joe, sitting in the front seat and reading a book, thinks she’s asleep too until she says softly, “Thank you.”

He’s startled, and glances over his shoulder at her in surprise. “What for?”

“For caring,” she says, and she opens her eyes and turns to look at him, smiling a little. She seems sad, he thinks, but not just sad. Bittersweet, maybe. “Not many people have cared about me in my life. You and my father are the first to stick around for this long in… well, in a long time.”

Deckard is out scavenging for food and supplies in some promising ruins they’ve come across; as usual, he asked Joe to stay behind and keep Ana safe. They never leave her alone if they can help it. “I…” He doesn’t know what to say, now. He _does_ care about her, because the three of them have been alone for so long and she’s kind to him. It wasn’t what he planned for, but he hadn’t planned for much. “We only have each other,” he says, finally.

“You didn’t have to come.” She seems to catch the look in his eyes, and she carries on before he can interrupt. “I know. You didn’t have many options. But you didn’t _have_ to come. And you didn’t have to bring him to me. You didn’t have to help us, or stay with us, or be on our side at all. But you’re here, and you _do_ care, and I appreciate that.”

He puts the book down in his lap, one thumb closed in his page. “It’s all I have,” he tells her quietly, apparently feeling honest.

“What do you mean?” she asks, brow furrowing.

“I mean…” He flexes his free hand against his knee, trying to put it into words. “Wallace took anything I had away from me. My job, though I doubt I could ever return to that work again. My home. My only companion. Now all I have left is… this.” He gestures to his body, and then to his head. “And a brain full of things that aren’t real.”

“Some of it is real.”

“And it connects me to you.” He meets her eye, and now she does look sad.

“Only the one,” Ana tells him, swallowing. She still carries guilt, he realises, even though her apology was genuine and he’s at peace with it now. “And besides, doesn’t my father keep telling you that if it’s real to you, it’s real? _You’re_ real, Joe.”

“It’s hard to believe,” he admits candidly. Normally he doesn’t engage like this. Somehow she’s getting under his skin this evening.

“Aren’t I proof?” she asks, shrugging one shoulder. “I mean, what do you think ‘ _real’_ means? We’re here. We exist. We’re real.”

She reaches one hand out to him, and for a moment he contemplates it. Then he twists a little further in his seat so that he can lay his own hand on top of it, palm to fingers. Her skin is cool and soft and feels alive. She drags her fingertips from the heel of his palm down his own fingers, pushing the dog’s head off her lap and sliding off the seat so that she can sit closer to him. With both hands, she inspects his outstretched hand, tracing the scars on the back, the scraped and swollen knuckles, then turning it over and feeling the callouses on the pads of his fingers.

“You feel real,” she says, very quietly, and if the engine had been running he wouldn’t even have been able to hear her. “Realer than some of the born-and-raised humans I’ve met, in my limited experience.”

Joe hasn’t touched very many hands in his own life, but hers are so soft and so gentle it’s almost overwhelming. It crosses his mind that very few people can afford to have hands like that anymore. But hers aren’t soft from money – they’re soft from safety that was imposed upon her like imprisonment.

(Maybe if more people had soft hands, and they held one another this kind way, it would be a better world to live in.)

Sitting twisted around in the seat this way is getting uncomfortable, so he takes his hand back, but then he puts his book aside and pushes up in the seat until he can slide, awkwardly, between the driver’s and passenger’s seats to join her in the back. She shifts to one side to allow him in, and he sits with her on the floor, facing her, knees drawn up to his chest.

“Thank _you_ for caring, too,” he says, more to his feet than to her.

 

They develop habits, over time. They have allies, though quite few, and _very_ far between. They have a handful of places they can usually depend on, places they can take shelter in for a few weeks at a time. They don’t follow a circuit, exactly – they can’t afford to be predictable. They meet their fair share of close calls. Sometimes Joe and Deckard have to shoot people. (They try not to tell Ana.) They shift between their known shelters and new explorations by traveling along various paths, sometimes doubling back or changing direction. If Deckard sees a drone exploring two of their stops in a row, it takes Ana hours to calm him down.

The lifestyle takes its toll on all three of them, but Deckard most of all. He’s spent over three decades hiding, and the added stress of keeping Ana safe and staying on the move isn’t good for him. Joe suspects the man’s liver is giving out, but he doesn’t say anything, because a blow to Deckard’s dignity might be even worse. Instead he and Ana do what they can to make his life easier – nothing he’d notice, of course, because he’s too proud to be taken care of, but they try to take on more of the load. Plan routes, find food, disguise themselves so they can go into the occasional supply depot for fuel cells.

Joe starts teaching Ana to shoot, because he knows by now that her safety is Deckard’s highest priority – frankly, it’s his now, too – and though it seems a crime to give such a kind soul lessons on how to do harm, they’ll both feel just a little more at ease if she can take care of herself. They practice with the guns that are easy to replace or get more charges for, using trash for target practice. She’s not half bad, though she hates it.

“I know,” Joe says. “So do I.”

Her ultimatum is that he teach her to patch up wounds, as well. She understands the principles of it, but for twenty years she was kept from having any contact with blood. She wants to know how to look after him, and her father, and anyone else she might have to, if the need should arise. It’s not unwise, he agrees, and he cuts open his arm so that he can show her how to sew it shut again. She’s horrified.

“It’s okay,” he tells her. “It’s a shallow cut, and my skin heals faster than a human’s. Besides, I’m used to it.”

Clasping a scrap of cloth against the wound, Ana gives him a sharp look. “Next time we wait for the opportunity to come up of its own accord,” she says, her voice hard. “I won’t have you cutting yourself open just so I can learn to put you back together. Please don’t hurt yourself that way again.” At the end, her eyes soften from anger to sadness, and he feels a pang of regret. He didn’t mean for that. He was just trying to speed up the process.

 

Eventually Deckard’s time comes. They pick their hideout furthest out of the way and settle in for him to spend his last days in relative comfort instead of the back seat of the spinner. Ana barely leaves his side, and the dog sticks close, too, knowing what’s coming. Joe stays with them sometimes, and others he leaves them in privacy. He doesn’t know how to feel.

Ana and Deckard talk about everything they can think of. They don’t know how long their time together has been, and Joe has a feeling they don’t want to, so he doesn’t tell them. He sits in on Deckard’s last good day, while the older man recounts as much of his life as he can – in particular, the time he spent with Rachel. He wants Ana to know about her mother. About how she came to exist. Ana cries openly, and Joe discovers a new space within himself for grief – some deep part of his heart that opens up to swallow Deckard’s tragedy and to learn that no wound ever fully heals. His own sorrow is sinking down towards that place and there, he comes to understand, it will live forever.

(It’s strange, he thinks, the language that places emotions in the heart. If anywhere, he would assume his feelings live in his head, along with everything else that might or might not be real about him. He hopes they’re real – he’s beginning to believe they’re real, thanks to the insistence of his companions.)

The next evening, Ana finds Joe in the bedroom he’s claimed as his own. “He wants to speak to you,” she tells him softly. For the first time since they arrived, Joe goes to sit with Deckard alone.

“Told you I wouldn’t be around forever, kid,” Deckard says, his voice tired.

Joe doesn’t know quite what to say to that. He licks his lips. “We both knew it would happen eventually,” he finally admits. “But I’d hoped you’d hold out longer. You should’ve.”

“Living like this is no good for your body,” Deckard answers, smiling wryly. “I’m thirty years too late to make better choices. I was never gonna stick it out to a ripe old age.” Coughing to clear his throat, he adds, “I need you to promise me something, Joe.”

“I’ll look after her,” Joe tells him, earnestly. “She’ll be safe.”

“That’s not what I want.” Deckard rolls his eyes. Joe looks at him in confusion, and he continues, “I know you’ll look after her. Never really doubted it. For a while there you really just didn’t know what else to do with yourself. And eventually you learned to care about her, too. I know she’s in safe hands.”

“Then, what could I possibly promise you?” Joe asks. He can’t imagine what else he has to give.

“To look after _yourself_ ,” Deckard says. “Don’t go down in flames for her. Find a way out. There’s always a way out.”

Joe looks down at his hands, considering that for a while. “Freysa told me,” he finally says, “that there was nothing more human than to die for a cause you believe in.”

Deckard snorts derisively. “Bullshit,” he mutters. “The most human thing you could possibly do, Joe, is _live_ for what you believe in. A cause, an idea, a person. Whatever. _Live_ for something, kid – that’s the human thing to do.”

“For what?” Joe asks, feeling lost.

“For whatever you want,” Deckard tells him, shrugging slightly. “I don’t care. I just want you to go out there and live. You’re as real as they come, Joe. Don’t forget it.”

They’re both quiet for a while. “Thank you,” Joe says. “For everything.”

“Yeah,” Deckard answers, and he looks like he wants to be gruff and shrug it off, but he’s dying, and he lets a little heart show through. “Just promise, you hear me? Promise, and keep it.”

“I promise,” Joe says.

In less than twenty-four hours, Deckard is gone.

 

Ana and Joe take a few days to grieve and put Deckard in the ground, and then they have to get moving again. As it turns out, possibly the hardest and most heartbreaking moment of the process is convincing the dog to get back into the spinner. He doesn’t want to leave Deckard’s graveside.

The driver’s seat used to be Deckard’s, more often than not. He preferred to be in charge that way. Now it’s Joe’s, and Ana takes up residence in the passenger side, next to him. For some reason, it feels very different. It also feels very quiet, because they don’t often have much to talk about, so Ana takes up reading to him while he drives. For Joe, this is strange, too – he used to do this for others. He can never seem to get used to receiving.

To repay the favour, he reads to _her_ , whenever they’re staying in one place for a while.

It doesn’t take long for them to reach total comfort with each other, even in silence. Neither of them like to be alone, so they rarely leave one another’s sides. They can go whole days where they barely speak, but they stick close together nonetheless, their loyal dog always by their feet. They’re not really sure what they’re doing any more, except for avoiding attention, but at least they’re together.

(Joe muses that he’s never been more alone, in a way, but he’s also never had so steadfast a companion. They barely see anyone but each other, yet they’re barely ever apart. Loneliness, he thinks, very late one night, is perhaps the keenest emotion he’s ever felt. Maybe _this_ is what makes him real.)

Without Deckard’s heightened anxieties, they stay put longer in each hideout, giving them a few weeks at a time to rest. Joe never goes over a month, though he’s not sure if Ana has noticed that that’s his limit. They favour stops where there are books to read, or music to listen to. Though it takes her some time, Ana teaches Joe to dance. It’s tricky, because frankly she taught _herself_ to dance, too, but at least it gives them something to laugh about.

Eventually, they unravel each other’s pasts. She talks about what she did and didn’t know about her past, and the intentions once held for her future; he talks about his job, mostly, and about Joi. For the first time in a while, now, he cries when he remembers her. Ana holds his hand and tells him to let it out.

 

They keep going. In some of the books they root out of various homes and libraries, there are adventures in which heroes go on the run – but it’s always so exciting. Full of close shaves and adrenaline-pounding escapes and high stakes. Their stakes are high enough, Joe supposes, but he’s good at this job, which means they don’t have that many near-misses – not as many as the protagonists in books, anyway. For the most part, they stay ahead of the game: they don’t get caught, don’t get spotted, don’t even see anyone else. Once in a while they dodge a drone, and even more rarely they have to avoid running into someone. Once or twice they slip away from people who might, maybe, be looking for them – replicants, Joe suspects, working for Freysa. But mostly, they live their quiet, lonely, tired life.

Joe spends a lot of time thinking about the final promise he made to Deckard. Eventually, he concludes that he used to live for Joi. His job as a blade runner really brought him no particular fulfillment – it was just the thing he was intended for. It wasn’t enjoyable. But he continued, and he came home every day so that he could see her again. Talk with her. Just be in her presence. It was a meaning he had to find for himself, but it was something to keep going for.

Without Joi, he spent a long time unsure what to live for. That was why he’d been content enough to die on the steps outside of Ana’s laboratory. But Deckard wouldn’t have it, so Joe is still here, and he has to find something new to live for. He’d taken on the job of looking after Ana, because it needed doing, and because he was there to do it.

But eventually, as she drifts off to sleep leaning on his chest, he realises he could live for her.

They’ve grown close. Not that it was much of a choice – they only have each other, a clunky spinner, and a dog. But they work well together. She helps him not to forget that there _is_ softness in the world, and that he’s allowed to appreciate that. He helps her stay safe, stay sane, stay grounded. They’re good for each other.

More than that, though, he comes to realise that he very genuinely appreciates her. She’s kind to him for no other reason than because she wants to be. She makes sure he eats, sleeps, smiles. She treats him like a _person_. He’s not sure if anyone else has ever done that the way she has. Joi did, but it’s different – Joi was what he needed her to be. Even on the days that he believes what they had was real, he knows she was what he needed her to be. Ana is self-created, and no one would have any reason to _expect_ her to treat a replicant as a person, but she does.

She cares, and as a result, so does he. It matters to him that she stays safe. It matters that she’s as happy as she can be with a life like this, that she’s not alone, that she’s where she wants to be. He can make this his purpose – to stay with her. To make sure she always has him to rely on.

(Two for three, he thinks. Purpose and family. They don’t have a home – not a permanent one, not a dependable one – but maybe home doesn’t have to be a place.)

Her breaths are slow and deep, and she lets out a long sigh, pressing into his chest as she falls deeper asleep.

Yes, he decides. He’s sure of it. He can live for her.


End file.
